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posted by janrinok on Sunday March 08 2015, @12:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the "those-were-the-days-my-friend" dept.

Ingrid Burrington writes in The Atlantic about a little-remembered incident that occurred in 1992 when activists Keith Kjoller and Peter Lumsdaine snuck into a Rockwell International facility in Seal Beach, California and in what they called an "act of conscience" used wood-splitting axes to break into two clean rooms containing nine satellites being built for the US government. Lumsdaine took his axe to one of the satellites, hitting it over 60 times. The Brigade's target was the Navigation Satellite Timing And Ranging (NAVSTAR) Program and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Both men belonged to the Lockheed Action Collective, a protest group that staged demonstrations and blockaded the entrance at the Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. test base in Santa Cruz in 1990. They said they intentionally took axes to the $50-million Navstar Global Position System satellite to bring the public's attention to what they termed the government's attempt to control the world through modern technology. "I had to slow the deployment of this system (which) makes conventional warfare much more lethal and nuclear war winnable in the eyes of some," an emotional Kjoller told the judge before receiving an 18-month sentence. "It's something that I couldn't let go by. I tried to do what was right rather than what was convenient."

Burrington recently contacted Lumsdaine to learn more about the Brigade and Lumsdaine expresses no regrets for his actions. Even if the technology has more and more civilian uses, Lumsdaine says, GPS remains “military in its origins, military in its goals, military in its development and [is still] controlled by the military.” Today, Lumsdaine views the thread connecting GPS and drones as part of a longer-term movement by military powers toward automated systems and compared today’s conditions to the opening sequence of Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor laments that the survivors of Skynet’s nuclear apocalypse “lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines.” "I think in a general way people need to look for those psychological, spiritual, cultural, logistical, technological weak points and leverage points and push hard there," says Lumsdaine. "It is so easy for all of us as human beings to take a deep breath and step aside and not face how very serious the situation is, because it's very unpleasant to look at the effort and potential consequences of challenging the powers that be. But the only thing higher than the cost of resistance is the cost of not resisting."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday March 08 2015, @08:18AM

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Sunday March 08 2015, @08:18AM (#154384) Homepage Journal

    It is quite clear the US military, Congress, the Commander in Chief &c. regard such automated means of warfare as drone-launched missiles as an advantage because we need not risk the lives nor limbs of our troops when we attack an enemy.

    The problem I've got with that is that if no Americans need perish when we go to war, we will start wars that we otherwise would not have, were our troops to make the ultimate sacrifice.

    As it stands now, compare the number of Iraqis and Afghanis who died to the number of deaths of American troops.

    Lest some Americans think it's a good thing that we could assert our will over everyone else without fear of retribution: the Russians, the North Koreans, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis and the Israelis all have nuclear weapons. It would not be hard for the Iranians to make them. I strongly suspect that Canada has them, as it is up to its eyeballs in Plutonium due to its use of the Candu heavy-water reactor.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2015, @01:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2015, @01:00AM (#154701)

    You'd better pray that's not true. Our neoliberal Conservative government gave our nuclear program to possibly the most corrupt company in Canada.

    Sort of proving the points above. Next up: Evil Canadian mining companies using nukes on third world native protestors.